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Reflections on the Transmission of Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences: A Fourteenth-Century Fragment in the Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona

2014; St. Bonaventure University; Volume: 72; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/frc.2014.0009

1945-9718

Daniel Gullo,

Medieval European Literature and History

Reflections on the Transmission of Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Sentences:A Fourteenth-Century Fragment in the Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona1 Daniel Gullo (bio) Hidden in the spine of a sixteenth-century collection of devotional works located in the Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona (Reserva 07-XVI-544) resides a previously unknown fourteenth-century fragment of Bonaventure da Bagnoregio’s (d. 1274) Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum. The small fragment survives as one of two parchment cuttings used to reinforce the miscellany’s spine under its original limp vellum binding.2 If on the one hand such fragments provide scholars with much needed information about the diffusion of Bonaventure’s work, Franciscan thought, and Parisian scholasticism to other parts of Europe during the Middle Ages, on the other hand, they also offer a glimpse into the local history of the book and the recycling of manuscripts as bookmakers moved from the era of the medieval manuscript to the era of the early modern printed book. The discovery of the fragment preserved in the Biblioteca de la Universitat sheds light on the history of medieval Bonaventurean studies in Iberia and the history of the book in Barcelona, from the age of the medieval reader to the foundation of the modern university library in the nineteenth century. In this case, the fragment and its history not only demonstrates how the circulation of the Commentaria in the Iberian Peninsula occurred slowly through partial or incomplete manuscript copies largely outside of Franciscan communities, but also how the few manuscript copies available in the [End Page 129] peninsula were quickly replaced by early printed copies of the work due to the canonization of Bonaventure by Sixtus IV at the end of the fifteenth century. I. Josep Jeroni Besora and the Barcelona Fragment of the Commentaria The Bonaventure fragment is preserved as binding material for a collection of six short dialogues written by Pedro Alfonso de Burgos (d. 1572), a monk and hermit at Santa Maria de Montserrat.3 Alfonso de Burgos, a prolific writer and theologian, composed the dialogues as vademecum on various religious topics such as the immortality of the soul, the solitary life, and the nature of religious vows for the reform of his monastic community.4 The printer Claudi Bornat (d. 1581), who had a history of working with Alfonso de Burgos, published the six treatises in small octavo format in Barcelona in 1562.5 The particular exemplars found in Reserva 07-XVI-544, though printed separately, were gathered and bound in a limp vellum binding that can be dated to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. We do not know who bound the six books together nor the immediate owner of the collected [End Page 130] works. However, codicological evidence suggests that the works never circulated separately, but rather were gathered and bound into a single volume using the Bonaventure fragment as a binding aid shortly after Claudi Bornat printed the works in 1562. This small collection of Alfonso de Burgos’ works passed into the extensive library of the bibliophile Josep Jeroni Besora (d. 1665) sometime during the early seventeenth century. An ex libris mark written in Besora’s own cursive script on the front inside cover of the book identifies him as the owner (Image 1).6 Besora, a canon of Lleida and leading politician in Barcelona during the 1640s and 1650s, amassed a collection of over 5500 books (both manuscript and printed) to form the largest private collection in Barcelona in the sixteenth century.7 The size of the collection led Pere Serra i Postius (d. 1748) to remark 100 years later that “even today, no other Catalan had been able to equal it in either size or quality.”8 Besora’s bibliophilia differed from those of the average [End Page 131] collector.9 He formed part of a circle of politically active humanists, including the historian Bishop Pierre de Marca of Couserans (d. 1662) and the Latinist Pere Torra, who used his library to create the first Latin-Catalan dictionary in 1650.10 Besora’s civic humanism led him to donate Alfonso de Burgos’ works, along with his entire library, to the Discalced...